House of Leaves

The novel presents itself as a manuscript by Zampano, a blind, recently dead scholar, discovered and edited for publication by Johnny Truant, a young tattoo parlor employee in Los Angeles whose own increasingly unstable footnotes run beneath Zampano's text for the length of the book. Zampano's subject is The Navidson Record, a documentary film, possibly fictional within the fiction, in which photojournalist Will Navidson and his partner Karen Green discover that their new house in rural Virginia is very slightly larger on the inside than its exterior measurements allow, a discrepancy that grows into a pitch black hallway appearing in their living room, leading to a windowless labyrinth that keeps rearranging itself and defies any explanation the characters or Zampano's academic apparatus of footnotes can offer. Professional explorers hired to map the space die or vanish inside it; Navidson eventually goes in alone, burning the pages of a book for light, before Karen, overcoming her own fear of enclosed spaces, goes in after him and brings him out alive. Around this story, Johnny Truant's own life comes apart as he edits the manuscript, he loses his job, his sanity fractures, his friend Lude dies, and in the novel's final pages he burns his own completed edition of Zampano's book only to find, days later, that it still exists, physically unharmed, the maze's central impossibility having apparently followed the text itself out of the story.

Unlike almost anything else on this list, reading it is a physical act: typography changes narrator by narrator, pages sometimes require turning the book sideways or upside down, and individual words scatter across otherwise blank pages to mimic the characters' own disorientation inside the house, with the word house itself printed in blue throughout.